Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Justine Greening and Meg Munn

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

1. What support she is providing to Pacific islands countries.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

The Department for International Development does not provide direct support to Pacific island countries. However, we provide direct support to Pitcairn, a UK overseas territory in the Pacific. In 2013-14, it was approximately £3 million.

[Meg Munn]

I thank the Secretary of State for her answer. Given that many small island states in the Pacific face severe threats from climate change and will fail to meet millennium development goals on education and health, and given that this year sees the once-a-decade small island developing states conference, will she take a lead on the Government’s involvement in that conference, and will she ensure that the House is kept updated on what this Government can do to support such countries, which are suffering?

[Justine Greening]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question, and I will write to her with fuller details, but, in summary, we do a significant amount of work in supporting Pacific islands. She mentioned climate change, and we in fact fund the World Bank group that is doing a pilot programme on climate resilience; we are a major donor to it. We also provide support through the European development fund and the Commonwealth. If I write to her with more details, perhaps she will get the reassurance she seeks.

Rail Investment

Debate between Justine Greening and Meg Munn

Monday 16th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

Yes, yes and yes.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, welcome the electrification of the midland main line. [Hon. Members: “Hooray!”] But a letter from the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs Villiers), arrived in my inbox shortly before this statement. It says:

“Completion of Midland Mainline electrification is proposed for 2019.”

That is seven years away. Given the increasing north-south divide, I urge the Secretary of State to bring it forward so that we get the benefits more quickly.

[Justine Greening]

To reassure the hon. Lady, I should say that we are looking at whether we can commence some of the investment earlier. We have had to set out our basic proposals, of course, but let us be clear: today we are setting out a statement of output—what we want to get out of the railway system. It is now for the industry to go away and look at how it can achieve the outcomes that we are specifying. The midland main line electrification is one of the key, explicit schemes that we have said we want to bring forward. If the industry has a proposal to do it faster than the timeline that we have mentioned, I have no doubt that we will be very interested in looking at it.

M5 Motorway Accident

Debate between Justine Greening and Meg Munn

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. During both my trip to the scene and local hospitals and that of the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead, the point was constantly made to us about the extremely effective way in which a number of different agencies had worked together. For example, at the hospital that I visited in Taunton, staff talked to me about how they had in place an emergency process for dealing with such an incident, and it worked extremely well when an incident finally happened. There are best practice lessons to be taken from that, and we will certainly work to ensure that they are disseminated to other agencies across the rest of the country. I hope that the Highways Agency will play a key role in that.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s personal commitment to road safety, because every single death is a tragedy. May I ask her to look again at the framework that her Department has developed? I believe that there has unfortunately been a tendency to see an increase in safety measures, such as better eyesight testing, as a burden rather than as something that will save lives.

[Justine Greening]

In all this we must strike the right balance, but I can absolutely assure the hon. Lady that I take incredibly seriously the issue of safety not just on the roads but across the transport system. I will take a very careful look at it to ensure that we always strike that balance. The strategic framework for road safety that we published in May contained a number of steps in the right direction. I would of course like to consider what more we can do, but we have, for example, increased fixed penalty notice fines for many motoring offences. The fixed penalty notice fine for speeding had not risen since 2000. The Government are taking a number of steps to ensure that we have a very proactive approach to road safety.